Lorraine's Cake & Candy Supply celebrates 40 years in business

For the past 40 years, family has been the key ingredient to Lorraine’s Cake & Candy Supply’s recipe for success.

Generations of baking enthusiasts coming through the doors since the store opened have been serviced by four generations of Lorraine and Jim Frisbee’s family, from their parents to their grandchildren.

Lorraine, then a Pembroke elementary school teacher, and Jim, an elevator technician in Boston, were encouraged by their accountant to open a business. The couple, who married in 1966 after meeting at the Marshfield roller rink, first had the idea to open a small fix-it shop for Jim, but upon further thought they recognized a need in the community they saw stemming from the kitchen at their home in Duxbury.

An avid baker since high school, Lorraine would often find herself in need of supplies that she couldn’t get locally, be it a cake topper, a specific piping tip or a specific type of tool.

“I would always send Jim in town to get something, because there was nothing around here and there was no online shopping in those days,” Lorraine said. “He was working in Boston so he’d swing over and get something for me, supplies.”

The couple figured that there must be other people having the same problem as Lorraine, so it made sense to open a cake-decorating store. The shop opened in Hanover’s Four Corners business district a couple doors down from their current location in 1977.

It was a “shabby chic” kind of place at first, Lorraine said. The initial displays at the store were taken from one Jim’s elevator clients, Gilchrist’s Department Store, which had recently closed. The couple made their initial focus customer service, which manifested itself in a way the Frisbees were familiar with.

“We were growing and I couldn’t afford everything on the line, so if someone said they needed something, Jim would go in town and buy it at full price so the customer had it the next day,” Lorraine said. “It was to keep that customer coming here. We did a lot of that until we could finally expand our inventory.”

Lorraine remained a teacher for the first few years of operation, during which her mother-in-law, Lillian Frisbee, manned the store while she was at work. Lorraine's father also worked at the store, making chocolates and candies that were sold at local stores. This family tradition continues today, with Lorraine's granddaughter Jessica running the store's social media presence.

After a few years in their original location, the store moved to its current space on Broadway, which had previously been an A&P, a Jehovah’s Witness meeting hall and an antique store.

“I remember being here all the time,” said Laurie Bourke, Lorraine and Jim’s daughter, who now runs the store. “My brother and I would sleep up back on the stage while they were doing work.”

A vacation to Australia for their 25th wedding anniversary led to another addition to their business. Around this time, fondant and gum paste were becoming more popular in America, and the Frisbees sought out baking shops down under.

“We went there and got a couple contacts for buying supplies in Australia,” Lorraine said. “We met with a company that made what we call Australian tins, which are cake pans in different shapes than the round and the square.”

Lorraine’s became the official distributor of the handmade Australian tins for the United States, which they still are today. The Frisbees brought the pans to International Cake Exploration Societé trade shows where they proved a huge hit.

“That’s how you get yourself known,” Lorraine said.

International bakers have played a large role in the history of Lorraine’s, particularly with a sponsorship program through which the store brought bakers and decorators from all around the world to Hanover to teach students techniques popular in their home countries.

One of the sponsored teachers who got their American start at Lorraine’s was Nicholas Lodge, a world-renowned pastry chef and master cake artist, who is a recurring judge on Food Network competition shows and who also created one of the official wedding cakes for the wedding of Princess Diana to Prince Charles.

Classes at Lorraine’s have long been a fixture of their offerings, with single session and multi-week courses offered year-round, primarily taught by members of the family.

“I grew up with it right from the start,” Bourke said. “I learned everything from my mother, and now I teach the classes.”

Lorraine herself first got her interest in baking and cake decorating when her mother went back to work and she, a high school student at the time, was instructed to be home when her younger brother came home from elementary school and to get started on dinner. Given the freedom to make what she wanted, she took the opportunity to make baked goods as well.

A neighbor had taken an adult education course in cake decorating, and Lorraine would spend time at her house after school watching her techniques, which inspired her to pursue this interest. She didn’t her first course in the art until after she was married, when her mother complimented her skills but told her she took too long to complete her projects.

While perfecting her skills, Lorraine would bring the baked goods she made to the Pembroke elementary school where she was a teacher.

“I’d bring things into the teachers’ room on Fridays and they’d devour everything,” she said. “90 percent of the teachers, their baking would be buying Oreo cookies.”

In addition to offering courses and selling products, Jim has been an inventor in the baking space, holding two patents: one for a bottle top designed to fit piping tips, and one that fits his own baking likes, a chocolate melting device.

“I enjoyed the cocoa painting, it was just a different thing to do,” Jim said. “I’m a mechanical guy, I’m into cars and that kind of stuff, so this just went with it.”

Jim, Lorraine and Laurie have all won multiple awards and trophies throughout the years for their confectionary creations.

Lorraine and Laurie both said that as trends in baking have changed over the years, they’ve continually educated themselves on the new and popular techniques, whether it be candy-making in the 1980s, rolled fondant in the 1990s, or cupcakes and cake pops in the 2000s.

“We try to hire people who know things, so that they can help people do their projects,” Lorraine said. “We’ve been very lucky that way.”

Lorraine’s’ customer base ranges in skill levels, from home bakers to students from Johnson & Wales University to professional bakers from many area bakeries. Tracey Noonan and Dani Vilagie, the mother-daughter duo behind Hanover-based Wicked Good Cupcakes, began their baking career by taking a class at Lorraine’s before gaining nationwide recognition on ABC’s “Shark Tank”.

“People ant to come in here and they want to get what they want,” Jim said. “They don’t want to wait to get it. We try to give them the service they want. Sometimes it’s hard, it really is, but we’ve been really fortunate to be here and do what we’ve done.”

Whether it’s the customer service, the family dynamic or the rabid fan base, Lorraine’s has had staying power.

“There used to be 10 or 12 different stores like this in Massachusetts,” Lorraine said. “I think we’re just the one that lasted. We’re still here. It feels great. I didn’t think it would ever happen. When you first open a business, you think hopefully you can make It through the first year, then the first five years, and here we are at 40.”